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Elegy in Neon

A liquor store in Ridgewood, Queens, declined Con Edison’s suggestion to replace neon with LED lights.Credit
James T. and Karla L. Murray

NEW YORK CITY exists in a perpetual state of reinvention. That is its nature. What was here yesterday is something else today and will be something new again tomorrow. That change sustains the city, imparts it with a vital energy that keeps it from becoming a frozen museum of itself, like Paris or Rome.

Sometimes it hurts, though, and all the more when a cherished local landmark, the kind with a “gruff till he knows you” owner and a moldering sign out front, gives way to the corporate banality of a chain retailer. The photographers James and Karla Murray have taken it as their personal mission to document those beloved places that give the city its character before they fade away. In 2008, they published the book “Store Front,” a tombstone-size elegy to a disappearing New York of Optimo cigar shops, Lower East Side brassiere wholesalers and kosher dairy joints.

Their new pendant to that volume, “New York Nights,” is a neon-soaked celebration of the nocturnal institutions that keep the city that never sleeps awake, satiated and comfortably numb.

“When you think of New York at night, you think of the skyline, of big, sweeping beauty shots,” James Murray said. “We wanted to take people to the street corner sparkling at night.”

You can trace your personal geography in these pages. Here’s the reformed speakeasy where you first spied that dark-eyed beauty, the old standby where they still know your order, the dim-sum parlor that served your grandparents and is still there for your children.

The Murrays, who are married and live in the East Village, shot these images in the early morning hours, that liminal time when the streets are empty and possessed of an alluring if somewhat melancholy glamour.

“We want people to go and look for themselves,” Karla Murray said, in the fluent New Yorkese of her native Bronx. “If you’re a tourist, you don’t have to go wherever your guidebook tells you to go. You can explore for yourself.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 30, 2012, on Page MB8 of the New York edition with the headline: Nocturnal Signs, With Character. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe